Telstra

How Telstra leverages its customer and employee communities to move the business forward

30 point increase in customer advocacy for broadband customers within 30 days

13 point increase in NPS for in-store plug-and-play purchases

50% fewer modem returns year-on-year

overview

Telstra, the leading telecommunications company in Australia, leverages both their employee community, Catalyst, and customer community, My Telstra Experience, to shape and deliver ‘a brilliant connected future for everyone.’

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Fast Facts

Industry:

Telecommunications

Role:

Customer Experience

Product Managers

Use case:

Customer experience

Marketing effectiveness

Product innovation

Employee engagement

Business Outcome:

Improve customer satisfaction

Accelerate innovation

Drive revenue growth

De-risk decisions

Business Challenge

With the release of the National Broadcast Network (nbn) in Australia, Telstra needed to adapt to a new market landscape and provide competitive offers with Telstra-only value to nbn customers.

Solution

To improve the lifetime value of their customers, Telstra has run 75 strategic initiatives through My Telstra Experience (MTE), a customer insight community powered by Vision Critical’s customer intelligence software. Launched in 2009, MTE is a customer sounding board that welcomes ongoing conversations with more than 11,000 customers who have contributed to over half a million customer engagements.

Like a focus group, MTE engages customers in purposeful and outcome-driven dialogues. What’s more, MTE can drive these group conversations across geographies and turn customer feedback into insights within hours.

Telstra also runs the Catalyst employee community to marry user and behavioural data with insight gathered from the community, exploring product set up, speed and performance, notifications, and overall experience.

Like in many organisations, Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a key business metric at Telstra. Through the MTE community Telstra has generated seven years of robust longitudinal insights and a deep level of understanding of their customers. By connecting these customer engagements with data sets (i.e. NPS and transactional data), Telstra is able to improve customer experiences over time, and drive more relevant, personalised experiences with their customers.

Telstra also leverages their customer community to better understand the overall experience and inform future customer journey mapping and specific business decisions for Telstra TV, Telstra's on-demand TV and streaming service. Over several weeks, 100 Telstra employees received a Telstra TV bundle and participated in three surveys and a continuous online forum, exploring product set up, usage of content, usage of apps and the overall experience. As a result, the product teams were able to feed the insight back into product development cycles quickly. For example, a key insight showed that 37% of people were confused at a specific touch point in the process; the product team was able to correct and prioritize the issue first.

MTE members have also been instrumental in supporting charitable organisations since 2009. In one example, MTE members selected their preferred charity, Redkite, an Australian organization that provides essential support to children, young people, and their loved ones suffering with cancer. Telstra has built meaningful relationships with MTE members that go beyond a brand-to-customer relationship.

What’s more, with the Catalyst employee community at hand, Telstra was able to identify pain points and gather in-depth insight from specific user journeys for a prototype product: the Telstra Smart Modem.

When comparing to the baseline, for customers with the Telstra Smart Modem Telstra has seen an average 15 point improvement in customer advocacy amongst new customers, with a peak of 30 point improvement in the first 30 days of launch. Additionally, Telstra has seen 50 percent fewer modem returns and an 18 percent decrease in order cancellations year-on-year.

Telstra is the 2017 Visionary Winner for the best use of customer intelligence across Asia Pacific.

30 point increase in customer advocacy for broadband customers within 30 days

13 point increase in NPS for in-store plug-and-play purchases

50% fewer modem returns year-on-year

The business would move forward without insights, but what the community enables us to do is bring the voice of the customer into some of our biggest decisions and move forward more confidently.